Prayers Continue For Centuries-Old Kievan Lavra In Kyiv

(ANALYSIS) What a nightmare.

I am back home, writing at my desk in the Southern Highlands after two weeks visiting Scotland, Ireland, Wales and thereabouts. I remain a bit jet-lagged, as is common for folks of my age, but there is work to be done.

The problem is that news from Ukraine has cancelled all of the plans that I had for today’s Rational Sheep post.

How can I write about the business-model disaster that has killed Star Wars, or the “Disclosure Day” sermon from Steven Spielberg (reviews are not making me hopeful), when a highly symbolic site above the Lavra Monastery of the Kievan Caves is, or was, on fire?

Once again, it is time for journalists to slow down and ask the questions at the heart of hard-news journalism: “Who,” “What,” “When,” “Where,” “Why” and “How”?

Alas, I fear that there is no way this will happen, with a story this controversial.

Let me start with the most basic questions — “What” and “Where”? Let’s start with one of the more cautious (that’s a good thing) headlines, care of CNN: “Ukraine’s historic Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery set on fire following major Russian attack.”

You can read the rest of this post on Substack.

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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.